To fill in the gap since the last post, I thought I’d get the notes which had been collecting up, posted here. pkgsrc got a mention in the Quarterly FreeBSD status report. My bulkbuild effort started on FreeBSD/amd64 10.1-RELEASE but thanks to my friend James O’Gorman, I was able to expand to FreeBSD 11-CURRENT and recently switched over from 10.1-RELEASE to 10.2-RELEASE.
I got the idea to try to pkgsrc on Android after someone posted a screenshot of their Nexus 7 tablet with the bootstrap process completed.

There are several projects on the google play store for running the user land built from a Linux/arm distro in a chroot on Android.
The first project I tried was Debian noroot (based on the tweet that inspired me), it spawned a full X11 desktop to run & so the process was painfully slow.

Switching to GNUroot Debian which just ran a shell in the chroot was much faster at extracting the pkgsrc archive though bootstrap still took long. The best result was with Linux deploy using an Arch Linux user land, everything was very snappy.

I spent a little time with OmniOS and “addressed” the outstanding issues which prevented it from working out of the box. shells/standalone-tcsh was excluded on OmniOS which prevented the version of tcsh shipped with the OS from being clobbered during bulkbuilds. The other issue was what appeared to be a problem with gettext but turned to be an issue with the compiler shipped with OmniOS. This became a topic of discussion on what the correct solution to the problem is. The GCC provided with OmniOS is built with Fortran support and includes the OpenMP libraries (I’m guessing this is the reason for the libraries) in its private lib directory inside /opt/gcc-4.8.1/lib, it turns out that gettext will make use of OpenMP libraries if it detects them during configure stage which I’ve not been able to find a concrete answer for why, the GCC documentation don’t say more than a paragraph about the OpenMP libraries themselves (libgomp) either. The problem was that GCC was exposing its private library in the link path but not in the run path, this meant you could produce binaries which would compile fine but would not run without having to play around with the runtime linker. In my case I’d previously added the private library locate to the runtime linkers search path as a workaround, I disabled the OpenMP support in devel/gettext-tools and that’s where the discussion began. Basically, it’s not possible to expose the private library location to the linker because that would cause issues with upgrades. The location should not be exposed by the compiler in the first place (I guess this was for the convenience of building the actual release of OS?). Richard Palo pursued the issue further and I’m informed that future releases of OmniOS will move libgomp out from this private location to /usr/lib so that it’s in the default library search path.

With the introduction of the GPLv3 license, GNU projects have been switching to the new license. This causes problems for projects outside the GNU eco-system which utilise them if the terms of the new license are unacceptable for them. Each project has dealt with it differently, for OpenBSD they maintain the last version which was available under GPLv2 & extend the functionality it provides. Bitrig has inherited some of this through the fork. Through the bulkbuilds it was revealed that the upstream version of binutils has no support for OpenBSD/amd64 or Bitrig at all. Adding rudimentary support was easily achieved by lifting some of the changes from the OpenBSD CVS repo. While at present I’m running bulkbuilds against a patched devel/binutils which I’ve not upstreamed or committed for both OpenBSD & Bitrig, I am thinking that for OpenBSD we should actually just use the native version and not attempt to build the package. For Bitrig, there is already a separate package in their ports tree for a newer version of binutils, it’s pulled in alongside other modern versions of tools under the meta/bitrig-syscomp package so it makes sense to mimic that behaviour.

Coming to the realisation that stock freedesktop components were not going to build on OpenBSD, I switched to using X11_TYPE=native to utilise what’s provided by Xenocara. Despite the switch, pkgsrc still attempted to ignore the native version of MesaLib and try to build its own, the build would fail and prevent a couple of thousand packages from building.
This turned out to be because of a test to detect the presence of X11 in mk/defaults/mk.conf, it was testing for the presence of an old path which no longer exists. As this test would fail, the native components would be ignored & pkgsrc components would be preferred. The tests for OpenBSD & Bitrig were removed & now default to a default of an empty PREFER_PKGSRC variable. The remaining platforms need to be switched over after testing now.

As Mac OS X on PowerPC gets older and older with time, the requirement for defining MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET grows ever more redundant, Ruby now ships with it & unless it’s defined, you will find that it’s not possible to build the ruby interpreter any more. I am considering setting MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET="10.4" for PowerPC systems running Tiger or Leopard so that packages could be shared between the two but have not had a chance to test on Leopard yet to commit it. I somehow ended up on a reply list for a ticket in the Perl RT for dealing with this exact issue there. They opted to cater for both legacy & modern version of OS X by setting the necessary variables where necessary.

It’s been a while since the last post in the series, the details of what was covered in these posts was the partial basis of my talk at BSDCan and I got to repeat the talk again in Berlin, I was much less nervous the second time, not having a fire alarm going off during the talk may have helped. I will cover briefly some things that were mentioned in the talks which I hadn’t written up here, for the sake of completeness.
Thanks to the DragonFlyBSD folks, I have access to a build server for doing regular bulkbuilds on. As I’m running these as a unprivileged user, there’s not much parallelism in the package builds, it’s one package at a time. The system aptly named Monster is a 48 Opteron CPU server with a 128GB of RAM so I can at least run with MAKE_JOBS set to 96. At the start of the bulkbuilds some deadlock issues in DragonFlyBSD were revealed by pkgsrc which Mat Dillon addressedpromptly.

On the Bitrig front, I managed to add support for the OS to lang/python27 which was the package causing the biggest breakage and now in the process of trying to get the support added upstream, there appears to be a bug report from 2013 in the Python bug tracker to add support ubut it was marked as won’t fix, I’m hoping the decision will be changed but will have to wait and see.
With Python 2.7 built successfully it was onto the next set of breakages, gettext!
I had taken a patch from OpenBSD ports for getting devel/gettext-tools building but was asked to back it out as it was not the correct solution to the problem. I decided to reapply the fix in my build just to progress to the next hurdle. The next major breakage was with devel/p5-gettext which needed to be told to include libiconv, I’m now stuck at getting converters/help2man building.
During this process I found that we were missing some necessary flags for creating shared libraries which were highlighted by clang:relocation R_X86_64_32S can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC

This turned out to be bug in the platform support, the necessary fPIC flags were defined but under a if statement for version of OS running with a.out binaries still. mk/platform/Bitrig.mk was stripped of anything related to a.out and everything was rebuilt again from scratch.

OpenBSD and Bitrig probably have many more breakages due to the fact that their architecture is detected as amd64 and not under the x86_64 banner by the build system. One example is x11/libdrm which is set to add sysutils/libpciaccess as a dependency if the host is a i386 or x86_64.
At present libdrm fails at the configure stage withchecking for PCIACCESS... no
configure: error: Package requirements (pciaccess >= 0.10) were not met:

No package 'pciaccess' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables PCIACCESS_CFLAGS
and PCIACCESS_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
Trying to add OpenBSD to the x86_64 arch list revealed a problem in pkgsrc, the culprit being devel/bmake.
The problem is that there are three separate points where the architecture is defined. In the bootstrap script, in BSDMake’s on source and the settings it passes onto pkgtools/pkg_install. Unfortunately the settings defined at the start in bootstrap are ignored at the bootstrap stage & are not necessarily what pkg_install is built with. To add to this, it’s possible that BSDMake may need to work out what the system is for itself rather than to be expected to have settings passed to itself. That is they should build with settings passed down in succession or independently.
With severe bludgeoning of code between devel/bmake and pkgtools/pkg_install, I managed to get it topkg_add: OpenBSD/x86_64 5.7 (pkg) vs. OpenBSD/amd64 5.7 (this host)
pkg_install performs a check of the OS it’s running on against the settings it was built with (the settings bmake passed it during bootstrap), removing the check revealed there was nothing else preventing things from working but the check needs to be there.

For OmniOS, a major components components in the OS which caused many packages to break was the bundled gettext, failing during builds as it could not find the libgomp from (the also bundled) GCC. As a temporary work around to see how the build would progress if libgomp could be found, I added the lib directory to the search path of ld using crle(1).

With the help of Joerg Sonnenberger, at pkgsrcCon I added support for fetching the OS version info in OmniOS & SmartOS for use in build build reports, this should mean that these operating systems will be reported correctly rather than as SunOS 5.11.

sevan.mit.edu is back online as a G4 Mac Mini with 128GB SSD. It’s yet to complete its first bulkbuild since the rebuild but it’s nearly finished as I type this.

Following on from last weeks post, I forgot to mention building on OpenBSD/sparc64 via a LDOM running on a Sun T5210, this was even more painful than the Solaris counterpart and took the best part of a month, some of this delay was initially caused by problematic packages which held up the build, not parallelising the builds and again issues with FTP mirrors.devel/electric-fence was another of packages which was responsible for holding up the build that I didn’t mention in the previous post. During the build it runs a binary called eftest and that’s it, it’s stuck there until killed.
The LDOM I was running in was allocated 4 vCPUs but the build was running as a single threaded build. Defining MAKE_JOBS=4 in pkg/etc/mk.conf and recompressing the bootstrap kit (bootstrap.tar.gz) helped this situation. To work around FTP issues, bulkbuilds were switched to HTTP only thanks to a pointer from Joerg Sonnenberger. As defined in pkgsrc/mk/defaults/mk.conf#MASTER_SORT_REGEX= ftp://.*/
# Same as MASTER_SORT, but takes a regular expression for more
# flexibility in matching. Regexps defined here have higher priority
# than MASTER_SORT. This example would prefer ftp transfers over
# anything else.
# Possible: Regexps as in awk(1)
# Default: none

Setting MASTER_SORT_REGEX= http://.*/ in pkg/etc/mk.conf and recompressing the bootstrap kit ensured builds use HTTP from there on.

The bulkbuild report showed lots of fallout from packages which hadn’t been updated yet to support LibreSSL e.g. net/wget expects DES support.
Rodent@ fixed lang/python27 with the changes due for subsequent releases of Python.
Bernard Spil fixed Heimdal which failed due to the lack of RAND_EGD in LibreSSL, these fixes will be in the next release of Heimdal (1.6.0?), back porting the changes to 1.5.3 which is the current release available resolved the issue with lack of RAND_EGD but then failed at building a kerberised telnet due to changes in the OpenBSD IPv6 stack which removed functionality telnet was expecting to be there. There is no fix for the issue in the OpenBSD ports as Heimdal is set to build without legacy and insecure protocols such as telnet and rsh.

Due to the connectivity issues on the OpenCSW build cluster, I erased the error report and restarted the bulkbuild on Solaris 10 SPARC and 11 x86 to re-attempt everything that had failed during the previous run for whichever reason. The Solaris 10 SPARC bulkbuild has now finished with a total of 7389 packages built, previously 5701. I discovered a particularly nasty bug with lang/gcc3-c++ which cost 3 days as the configure stage ran over and over again before being killed manually.

My access to the AIX LPAR expired, taking with it what I had previously tried, I requested access again but this time also requested access to a LPAR running SUSE 12 on Power8 as well.
Still no further with the AIX LPAR but managed to getting bulkbuild going on the SUSE 12 one with a little bit of assistance.
The first thing which needed to be done was to specify the ABI and the suffix applied to the library search path. This is because the system is 64 bit without any 32bit libraries installed and by default pkgsrc opts for 32bit unless set otherwise. When attempting to bootstrap initially, it failed with ERROR: bin/digest: missing library: libc.so.6. I initially set about the wrong path of trying to locate the glibc-32bit rpm for SUSE on Power before realising what was actually required. This may have been a knee-jerk reaction from the past before the days of yum and such on Linux. With the necessary change to pkgsrc/mk/platform/Linux.mk the bulkbuild environment setup continued before hanging on the installation of pkgtools/pkg_install. pkg_add would hang and CPU utilisation would spike to 100%.

A backtrace of the running process in gdb revealed it was stuck on mpool_get().(gdb) bt
#0 0x0000000010096650 in mpool_get ()
#1 0x0000000010093658 in __bt_search ()
#2 0x000000001009318c in __bt_put ()
#3 0x000000001000b614 in pkgdb_store ()
#4 0x000000001000430c in extract_files ()
#5 0x0000000010006fd0 in pkg_do ()
#6 0x00000000100075a4 in pkg_perform ()
#7 0x0000000010005650 in main ()
Turns out the issue also affects pkgsrc on Linux/ARM and was previously reported in a bug report from 2013 with a workaround. Setting the GCC optimisation level to 0 for pkgtools/libnbcompat and pkgtools/pkg_install allowed mk/pbulk/pbulk.sh to setup a buklbuild environment and a bulkbuild is currently in progress. The bulkbuild was initially aborted to added some critical missing components which caused major breakage.

zypper install libxshmfence-devel gettext-tools gcc-c++.

With Suse Linux on Power8, that bumps my operating system count to 9 across 5 architectures. Just need to get AIX going to round off the OS count. 🙂

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic, as the time for BSDcan gets shorter and shorter, I’m thinking about my talk and testing more and more in pkgsrc. Rodent@ added support for Bitrig to pkgsrc-current last month, his patches highlighted an issue with the autoconf scripts (which should be shared across core components) not being pulled in automatically. Joerg Sonnenberger resolved this issue and I regenerated the patch set again. With the system bootstrapped the next thing which was broken was Perl, applying the changes needed for OpenBSD resolved any remaining issues and the bulk build environment was ready. After three days, the first bulkbuild attempt on Bitrig was complete and a report was published. There is now a bulkbuild in progress with devel/gettext-tools and archivers/unzip fixed, that should free over 8400 packages to be attempted to be built.
For Solaris, my first bulkbuild on Solaris 10 completed after 22 days. Mid-April I also started off bulkbuilds on Solaris 11 (x86 and SPARC) using the SunStudio compilers (It’s not possible to use GCC at the moment due to removed functionality that was previously deprecated). The Solaris 11 SPARC bulkbuild is still in progress and the x86 bulkbuild is running. Unfortunately the build cluster had some connectivity issues and needed rebooting during the bulkbuild but not until lots of packages had failed to fetch distfiles, hence the figures look a lot worse than they could be. Solaris 10 SPARC report, Solaris 11 x86 report.

Through bulk building on multiple operating systems another issue that’s surfaced is problematic packages that hold the build up. On Bitrig mail/fml4 is an issue, on OpenBSD www/wml, FTP mirror issues for ruby extension on Solaris, Xorg FTP mirror issues on OmniOS. Things need regular kicking, a brief glance into pkgsrc/mk didn’t reveal any knobs which would allow the preference of HTTP for fetching distfiles. On Bitrig & OpenBSD I’ve excluded these packages from being attempted via NOT_FOR_PLATFORM statement in their Makefile until I have a look into the issue.

sevan.mit.edu completed another bulkbuild, pkgsrc-current now ships with MesaLib 10.5.3 as graphics/MesaLib, version 7 has now been re-imported as graphics/MesaLib7 by tnn@, the new MesaLib needed a patch for FreeBSD, similar to NetBSD to build successfully, due to ERESTART not being defined. At present, it’s still broken on Tiger as I’ve not looked into yet.

I revisited AIX again to test out pkgsrc once again, this has turned into a massive yak shaving session. I’ve yet to run a bulkbuild successfully as the scan stage ends with a coredump.
I originally started off with using the stock system shell, bootstrap completed successfully but scan stage of a bulkbuild would just stop without anything being logged. Manually changing the shell used to shells/pdksh in pkg/etc/mk.conf and pbulk/etc/mk.conf resulted in the following error message:bmake: don't know how to make pbulk-index. Stop
pbulk-scan: realloc failed:

This turned to be a lack of RAM, my shell account was to a AIX 7.1 LPAR running on a Power8 host with 2 CPUs and 2GB of RAM committed, unfortunately the OS image IBM provided came with Tivoli support enabled and a bug in the resource management controller which meant RMC was consuming way more resource than it needed to. I was running with less than 128MB of RAM.
Stopping Tivoli & RMC freed up about 500MB of RAM, attempting to bulkbuild again, caused the process to fail once again at the same stage. With a heads up from David Brownlee & Joerg Sonnenberger, I bumped the memory and data area resource limits to 256MB.
This allowed the scan to finish with a segfault./usr/pkgsrc/pbulk/libexec/pbulk/scan[54]: 11272416 Segmentation fault(coredump).pscan.stderr logged multiple instances ofbmake: don't know how to make pbulk-index. Stop.
The segfault generated a coredump but it turned out that dbx, the debugger in AIX was not installed. IBMPDP on twitter helped by pointing to the path where some components are available for installation, unfortunately, while the dbx package was available there, some of its dependencies were not. Waiting on IBMPDP to get back to me, I fetched a new pkgsrc-current snapshot (I couldn’t update via CVS because it wouldn’t build) and re-setup my pbulk environment via mk/pbulk/pbulk.sh.
I should mention that initially when I setup, I’d explicitly set CC=/usr/bin/gcc last time, then while trying to get various things to build subsequently, I’d symlink /usr/bin/cc to /usr/bin/gcc. When I came to set thing up with the new snapshot, I did not pass CC=/usr/bin/gcc this time round and found that I was unable to link Perl, not sure if this was the Perl build files assuming if on AIX & /usr/bin/cc exists, it’s XLC or if ld(1) takes on different behaviour but I had to remove this symlink.
Once everything was setup, the bulkbuild failed agin at the same place, except this time I had a different message logged./bin/sh: There is no process to read data written to a pipe..
I edited the bootstrap/bootstrap script & devel/bmake/Makefile to set shells/pdksh as a dependency & rerun bulkbuild.
The scan stage again completed with a coredump with this time pscan.stderr just contained Memory fault (core dumped).
I’ve committed these changes so pkgsrc-current now defaults to using shells/pdksh as its shell but have not been able to try anything else as this weekend the system is unaccessible due to maintenance.

Or should that be a month of pkgsrc!
Since I wrote my last post I received the good news that I’ll be presenting at BSDCan this year in Ottawa. I’m really stoked about this and looking forward to presenting there. In preparation for the big day, I’ll be speaking about different aspects of what I’ve been working on at various events/meetings. My first speaking opportunities will be at Oracle’s SolarisSIG (LOSUG in a past life) tomorrow on cross platform packaging with pkgsrc.
I didn’t have any hosts running Solaris to attempt bulkbuilds on for this, so I asked for shell access at various places, this landed me with access to Solaris 9 to 11 on x86 & SPARC and OmniOS.
Shell access to a Solaris 10u9 host came first and I quickly found that mandoc would not build due to the use of mkdtemp(), dirfd() and vasprintf() whilst attempting to setup a bulkbuild environment using the mk/pbulk/pbulk.sh script in pkgsrc.
Following up with the mandoc developers regarding the issue meant the issue was fixed by Ingo Schwarze within a couple of days with access to Solaris via OpenCSW, the next release of mandoc due Summer time will contain these fixes. I’m undecided whether to back port the fixes to the current release or not. If you have a Solaris 10 host with a “recent” patch cluster (unsure how recent) you should be unaffected by this issue.

On OmniOS, the shells/standalone-tcsh package reared its head again. OmniOS ships with tcsh as standard which shells/standalone-tcsh clobbers again during bulkbuild. The solution to this may be that pkgsrc becomes aware of the various Illumos distros instead of treating everything as SunOS, but nothing has been decided for definite and needs further discussion.
The bulkbuilds on OmniOS using the toolchain published in IPS for that release show issues in pkgsrc where libgomp bundled with GCC is not being found by gettext, this causes lots of packages to fail.
The first bulkbuild which completed showed it was possible to build 9547 out 15245 packages without issue but the inability to build databases/shared-mime-info due to the libgomp issue caused 2274 packages to fail. This was the large impact of the issue mentioned but there are more packages which suffer from the same problem.

With the resumption of bulk building pkgsrc on FreeBSD, I found lots of packages which would fail to package due to use of the -o flag with pax(1) which is not present in the FreeBSD version. I’ve not yet addresses the issue with those packages but I did raise a patch for FreeBSD-current so that it will be available in future versions of FreeBSD. It is now committed and will treacle down to 10-STABLE at some point for inclusion in FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE.

Bulk builds have also resumed on OpenBSD/amd64 and Sparc64, there is a third bulkbuild in progress on amd64 while the sparc64 host is still running the first attempt. The use of unprivileged user account and the lack of nullfs support prevents the setup of parallel runs to speed up the process. Building on OpenBSD was extremely useful for indicating what software in pkgsrc is effected by LibreSSL without having to put effort into integrating LibreSSL into pkgsrc first. It also raised an instance of copying overlapping buffers destructively (using memcpy() vs memmove()), a fix for this issue is yet to be committed pending further investigation. MAKE_JOBS was raised to 8 on OpenBSD/sparc64 to improve performance whilst compiling, the build environment is hosted on a Sun T5210 with a dedicated disk mounted with soft writes & the kern.bufcachepercent value bumped from 20 to 50.

11224 binary packages built with gcc for Darwin 8.11.0/powerpc
10019 binary packages built with gcc for Darwin 10.8.0/i386

My first bulkbuild report sent to to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list back in September 2014 shows a total of 8501 packages could be built. There is more work required to keep this position in the future, as a new version of MesaLib is to be committed at some point soon. There is a bulkbuild in progress on sevan.mit.edu, upon completion I’ll be placing a request for the host to be wiped and setup again, the bulk builds are getting slower and slower and I suspect the IDE disk may be failing.

For testing changes related to OS X in pkgsrc I revisited trying to get virtual machines of the various releases of OS X running to improve test coverage. At present I’m confined to testing on Tiger and Mavericks though I also have machines running Leopard and Lion but they need setting up.
By default, it’s not possible to boot an instance of Mac OS X from a genuine install image, on a Mac host, running OS X using virtualbox.
Searching around reveals using modified images intended for building Hackintosh as the solution most people use. Virtualbox supports OS X guests but when following the usual steps in the wizard to create a new VM & pointing it to your unmodified OS image, nothing much happens.
Depending on the version of OS X you’re trying to boot you’ll either end up with a XNU hang/panic or just dropped straight to an EFI prompt.
Again, depending on the version of OS X being attempted the issue differs. I’ve managed to install 10.7 to 10.10 successfully on virtualbox so far. 10.5 & 10.6 remain to be done.

10.7 – Lion

With the release of 10.7, Apple changed the way OS was packaged, the digital distribution came with a disk image named InstallESD.dmg nested inside an application named Install Mac OS X Lion.app. It’s possible to use this disk image with virtualbox as-is without change however the system will not boot from the image because it fails a test by the boot loader to ensure the image is being booted on a genuine Mac. In my case it is, but unfortunately the cpuid virtualbox presents to the operating system is not one that the OS recognise & so it fails.
The solution to this is to tell virtualbox to mask the cpuid of the guest, unfortunately depending on the version of hardware? or virtualbox that you’re using you may have to experiment with which ID works. I first tried the ID 00000001 000306a9 00020800 80000201 178bfbff listed in the post by BitTorrent engineering but it did not work on a Mid-2012 MacBookAir5,1 with VirtualBox 4.3.22 r98236.
Searching around I found the ID 1 000206a7 02100800 1fbae3bf bfebfbff to try in a comment on another guide which did work.

To create a working VM of Lion in virtual
1) Create a VM in virtualbox named something, type Mac OS X, version Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (64 bit).
2) Before booting the VM, switch to Terminal and change the cpuid of the guest by runningVBoxManage modifyvm something --cpuidset 1 000206a7 02100800 1fbae3bf bfebfbff
3) Right click on Install Mac OS X Lion.app, select “Show Package Contents” and navigate to Contents/SharedSupport. Copy InstallESD.dmg to a locate on your disk which is navigatable.
4) Start the VM & when asked for an install disk, point to the InstallESD.dmg which you copied out in the previous step. The system should boot without any need for further modification (most guides recommend other changes such as switching to a PIIX chipset).

10.8 – Mountain Lion and newer

With Montain Lion, InstallESD.dmg was changed once again, this time to contain multiple partitions (EFI, Boot/Rescue, Install), unfortunately it’s not possible to boot these images successfully as the notion of multiple partitions is not applicable to media such as optical so what happens is that the system is able to boot from the disk image & load the kernel but unable to continue to load the install environment.
What needs to happen is a new “flattened” image needs to be generated which is on a single partition & contains everything from the boot partition.
There is no need to modify any settings for the VM such as cpuid as previous or chipset as recommended by other guides like Engadgets

To flatten the image a tool called iESD is used.
iESD can either be installed via gem(1) or if you’re a pkgsrc user, I’ve created a WiPpackage.

The instruction in the Engadget guide pretty much covers everything needed. Just make sure that the disk images are fully detached before issuing the hdiutil commands, quickest way being to open Disk Utility.app, selecting mounted disk images & pressing eject or checkout the output of hdiutil info & using hdiutil detach $devicename to detach all device names associated with the disk images.

Time again to write up what’s been happening on the pkgsrc front since last time, this time the focus hasn’t been so much around pkgsrc on Darwin/PowerPC but more about pkgsrc in general & not necessarily code related.
At the end of the last post I mentioned a gentleman who’d been working on pkgsrc/Haiku and posting videos of his progress, I managed to make contact with him (James) & discussed his work that he’d been doing on pkgsrc. He sent me copy of the repo he’d be working off so I could assist with the aim of getting everything upstreamed as in the current state everything would need to be reintegrated per quarterly release rather than only having to pay attention if a new issue has arisen.
After getting the correct version of Haiku installed in virtualbox, I discovered a nasty bug in the Haiku network kit, it was unable to detect when the end of the file had been reached & would continue (restart?), this was revealed when I tried to download the pkgsrc tar ball from via WebPositive, ftp from the terminal was not affected however. pkgsrc bootstrapped unprivileged without issue. Hint: use the nightly snapshots until there is a newer release than Alpha 1 available.
The integration of pkgsrc into the user-land on Haiku is not currently possible due to the way the user-land is constructed, from what I understood, each Haiku package contains a piece of the filesystem, all the packages are union mounted to construct the user-land dynamically when the system comes up. That aside, with my system bootstrapped, I attempted to build Perl and ran into another bug, it seems that the library path for libperl is not populated on haiku hence perl is able to “build” but unable to run, the workaround for this in the tree I was given was to symlink libperl into ~/pkg/lib & move on. I tried various things but was unsuccessful, I believe the problem is pkgsrc specific as the version of Perl available in haikuports do not need any special treatment and the rpath is passed in correctly.
The problem was trying to isolate the required change to fix the problem, whereas in pkgsrc a policy file is passed to the build to set how Perl should be built, haikuports clobbers the source & patches in a replacement, I stopped at that point.

At around about this time I received the good news about the NetBSD Foundation membership and commit bit so my focus moved to reading the various developer documentation & getting familiar with processes.

sevan.mit.edu finished a bulkbulid attempt of the entire tree which took the longest time so far to complete, through all the build attempts I uncovered a new bug, the range to use for numerical IDs of UID/GID, is not sufficient to cover all the packages in the tree that need to create an account. On further discussion with asau@, it was suggested the IDs are allocated randomly and should be fixed for consistency across builds. I started doing bulkbuilds of the entire tree on FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE and stumbled across a very nasty bug. There is a version of tcsh package in the pkgsrc tree called shells/standalone-tcsh, this is tcsh built as a static binary & set to install to /bin (the only package in the pkgsrc tree which violates the rules and places files outside of $PREFIX by default?), this ended up overwriting the system bundled version of tcsh in FreeBSD & then deleting /bin/tcsh when the package is removed, this was fixed promptly by dholland@. It was also discovered that Python’s configure script had not been changed when FreeBSD switched to elf binaries and so still trimmed the name of libraries to account for the old linker which could not handle a minor version in a libraries filename (libpython.so.1, not libpython.so.1.0). All versions of Python had been patched in the pkgsrc tree to remove this change so that it used a consistent naming convention across all platforms. After discussing this with bapt@ (FreeBSD) at FOSDEM, it turned out to be bug and should be fixed in future Python versions once the fixes are upstreamed.

The opportunity to join the pkg-security team came up & for the past few weeks I’ve been getting familiar with the processes of dealing with security advisories & listing them so that users who fetch the pkg-vulnerabilities database are notified if they have any vulnerable packages installed. The general advisory process is a little infuriating, based on my recent experience I’d say at the top of my list are the Oracle security advisories as they do not divulge any details other than “unknown” in version(s) X, PHP for the frequency, OpenSSL for the impact. On the one hand I was quite impressed that CVE IDs were becoming so familiar that I could spot, on the fly, an advisory that had been accounted for, but on the other hand quite upset that I was using brain capacity on this. The availability of information is quite frustrating too, issues which are assigned an ID but cannot by checked on Mitre’s site take extra effort to find the necessary information to include (Mitre are responsible for allocating the CVEs!), I should note that this is from public advisories, say from a distribution. Example, CVE-2015-0240 was announced today, the Redhat security team published a blog post covering the issue, the Mitre site at present says:
“** RESERVED ** This candidate has been reserved by an organisation or individual that will use it when announcing a new security problem. When the candidate has been publicised, the details for this candidate will be provided.”
The wording & the lack of information can also be frustrating because it’s not clear what is affected. Looking at it positively, the requirement for clarification on these discrepancies means I get lots of opportunities to approach new people in different communities to ask questions.

One thing that’s clearly evident is my workflow needs attention, at the moment things are very clumsy, involving lots of switching around but hopefully that will be addressed in the coming month. The first thing I’ve done is setup templates for emails with the correct preferences specified so that I just need to fill the necessary information & hit send, the necessary settings are automatically applied. Still thinking about how to deal with the scenario where the system that work is being carried out on is different to the system where the patch is going to be committed from, this also happens to be a different system which a developer is using. How to deal with that in as few steps from reading, say a bug report, to generating a patch, testing it & committing a fix.

For testing patches on Mac OS X, I revisited running OS X as guest on a Mac running OS X with virtualbox. Attempts in the past had not been successful & it seemed from search results that the only approach taken was to use modified OS images for hackintosh which I did not want to take. I have a genuine machine & genuine license, I shouldn’t have to resort to 3rd party images to run this. After whinging on twitter & referencing some older links I was able to successfully virtualise Mac OS X 10.7 to 10.10 in virtualbox. Will follow up with the details on that in a separate post.

Since the last post I’ve made some further progress with pkgsrc on Darwin/PowerPC again, the biggest achievement was fixing lang/ruby19-base, lang/ruby200-base and lang/ruby21-base which accounted for the breakage of some 1500 packages (variation of 500 or so modules for each version of Ruby). This was caused by the failure to build the DBM module, which on OS X required the inclusion of dbm.h as well as ndbm.h otherwise all tests fail and the module is not built. The frustrating thing is that there appears to be no documentation for the build process of Ruby, luckily, by Ruby 2.0 there was a comment added to ext/db/extconf.rb to shed some light on the issue:# Berkeley DB's ndbm.h (since 1.85 at least) defines DBM_SUFFIX.
# Note that _DB_H_ is not defined on Mac OS X because
# it uses Berkeley DB 1 but ndbm.h doesn't include db.h.pkg/49508 was committed prior to the 2014Q4 pkgsrc release butpkg/49511 and pkg/49512 did not.

devel/commit-patch used the -a flag for cp(1) which isn’t available on older operating systems, pkg/49475 switched to the use of -pPR instead (which -a is an alias of).

graphics/ivtools failed to build successfully due to a packing issue due to the explicit specification of operating system in the name of one of the generated files. pkg/49497 switched the use of the LOWER_OPSYS & added missing item which addressed the issue.

security/CSP failed at the installation stage due to the target directory not existing, pkg/49499 fixed that.

mail/nullmailer referenced uid_t & guid_t but did not include sys/types.h, pkg/49523 fixed that.

net/dnsmasq referenced SIOCGIFAFLAG_IN6, IN6_IFF_TENTATIVE, IN6_IFF_DEPRECATED & SIOCGIFALIFETIME_IN6 but did not include netinet6/in6_var.h when building on OS X which broke the build. pkg/49524 fixed that.

lang/lua52 failed to build on Tiger due to sys/types.h, pkg/49526 fixed that.

lang/php55 bundles its own version of sqlite and requires the necessary flags to disable features not available pkg/49527 fixed that but the correct fix is to not build an entire new version solely for PHP’s use. I began to look but had flashbacks of dealing with the same issue in TCL.

For graphics/MesaLib I looked to build it using a newer version of binutils but it appears that support for Darwin/OS X/iOS and Mach-o is rudimentary and hence missing support in most of the tools. Support began being added upstream to binutils back in 2011 but is still not complete.

For devel/cmake supports the ability to specify the location of library & header files, this can be done by creating a file which includes the necessary declaration that is passed to the configuration process using the --init flag. Indeed when the configuration process displayed the correct versions of OpenSSL, CURL, Zlib, BZip among others from pkgsrc rather than the older system bundled versions, unfortunately the build still failed when it came to the linking stage as the paths to the libraries was prefixed with /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk, as a kludge just to progress with the builds, I symlinked /usr/pkg to /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr, the build then succeeded without issue. Next task is to work out how to drop the /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk prefix correctly.

There are currently 11132 packages available on sevan.mit.edu for Mac OS X/PowerPC with a new bulkbuild of the entire tree in progress. There are also Intel builds of the entire tree being attempted by Save OS X (64-bit packages) and Jonathan Perkin (32-bit packages) which should further improve support for OS X in pkgsrc.

Whilst browsing I discovered a series of videos on youtube by DisneyDumbazz, he has also been covering his work on improving support for Haiku in pkgsrc at length.
He was also struggling with issue in Ruby, QT4 & Mesa it seems.

Definitely more than a week, I’ve not had a chance to devote much time to this over the past few months due but have made sufficient progress to qualify another post.
The most import thing is apart from one PR, all previously submitted patches have now been committed to pkgsrc-current, pkg/49082 still remains.

With the introduction of GCC 4.9, the same changes needed to be applied to lang/gcc49 as with previous versions, pkg/49178 took care of that, however this highlighted another problem. 32bit & 64bit hosts running Darwin both identify themselves as powerpc in the uname(1) output which means that GCC is always built with multilib support disabled, even when building on a 64bit host.

Some of the cross compilation tools for micro controllers were hardcoded to use ksh to build with when in fact it was only required for NetBSD >= 5, this caused the build to break on Tiger (assuming because of the old version of bundled ksh), pkg/49311 fixed that for cross/binutils but the changes were also applied to cross/freemint-binutils and devel/binutils by the maintainer.

cross/avr-libc was previously broken because it was using the system compiler & headers instead of avr-gcc and the headers installed in pkgsrc during builds. pkg/49316 fixed this issue and upgraded the version to v1.81 of avr-libc.

It’s no longer a requirement to declare the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable to build lang/perl5. By default Perl declares this to be 10.3 which is no longer applicable on modern systems and when building with clang mmacosx-version-min is specified, making it redundant. This had been removed in pkgsrc via a patch and it broke the build for GCC users as without this variable the target defaults to 10.1 and Perl needs specific attention for versions prior to Panther. pkg/49349 added this variable back in for Darwin 9 and prior which were GCC only releases. Bug #117433 in the Perl RT was the source of the patch proposed to resolve the issue.

lang/ocaml now builds on Tiger, the workaround for the lack of support for -no_compact_unwind in the shipped linker was applicable to prior releases and not just specifically Leopard, pkg/49417 fixed that.

devel/py-py2app previously failed to build on PowerPC OS X due to an error in the PLIST, the use of the MACHINE_ARCH variable would expand to powerpc which raised a packing error. pkg/49418 fixed that.

graphics/MesaLib and devel/cmake still remain broken in the pkgsrc tree for Darwin PowerPC, I was able to generate a MesaLib package successfully by forcing static binaries which allowed the previously unattempted packages to be tried in a bulk build of the entire tree. Unfortunately I hadn’t caught a merge conflict from when pkg/49077 was committed and so devel/icu was not built, this caused a another large subset of packages to not be built.

With these changes, there were over 10000 packages available on sevan.mit.edu but unfortunately that included lots of duplicate packages from previous bulk builds. pkgtools/pkglint has the ability to scan packages against a pkgsrc tree & remove duplicate/stale packages. Running lintpkgsrc -K /mnt/packages -pr took the number of packages down to 9200. There is an AWK based solution but I’ve not had a chance to try it.

I was able to get devel/cmake to build successfully by removing the references to /Developer/SDKs in Modules/Platform/Darwin.cmake and subsequently build packages such as databases/mysql56-client but I’ve not added the changes to the tree yet. Will look to add this in a future bulk build, I want to get MesaLib linking correctly first before adding more kludges into the mix. The next thing I want to try is using a newer version of linker from devel/binutils instead of the one bundled with Xcode.

I was recently looking for a link I thought I’d bookmarked on how to install recent versions of Mac OS X on EoL Apple hardware, specifically the Mac Pro. I was unsuccessful in finding the link I was looking for but I did find that you can re-flash a MacPro1,1 with a MacPro2,1 EFI firmware, main benefit being microcode updates. Turns out the hardware in the first & second generation Mac Pro is identical bar the model of CPU available. There’s also modified images to bring the MacPro4,1 to 5,1 which seems to provide much more benefit than the previously mentioned modification.

This got me thinking about some of the issues I’d experienced with older apple hardware and the work arounds, it has been a while since I’ve posted something here so I wrote this post.

On the old world SCSI Macs (pre biege G3?) the drive vendor on the disk firmware with be identified as Apple which the Drive Setup utility (predecessor of Disk Utility) would look for, if it was not found, you would not be able to format your drive as HFS and hence be unable to install Mac OS. Work around was either finding another platform to format the disk or modify a copy of Drive Setup utility with ResEdit & add the drive to the necessary table.

The first of blue & white PowerMac G3 systems logic board shipped with a buggy CMD IDE controller which would corrupt data when doing DMA transfer, Apple shipped the disks in these systems with the firmware tied to PIO mode which was lots of fun when you came to replace the disk with a newer/bigger/faster one. To complete the replacement successfully, the new disk with need to be connected to a PC first & using the firmware utility provided by the vendor, make the same change of restricting the disks operation mode to PIO, otherwise it would not be possible to rely on the disk as data would be corrupted as you began writing to it, there was a recall for the motherboard If you were aware of the issue at the time.

The Mid/Late 2007 MacBook Pro (per advisory?) has the SATA port on the ICH8-M south bridge locked to SATA I even though it is capable of SATA II.

Most systems with user replaceable RAM are capable of taking more than official specification documents list. MacTracker – an application which lists specs & information about Apple hardware provides advertised & actual maximum memory capabilities of system. Not so much a software based restriction but a documentation one.

Shortly after the last blog post I had access to a couple of AIX LPAR. This would be my first time on a IBM PowerPC system and AIX, I’d applied for two AIX 7.1 instances, one defined as “AIX 7.1 Porting Image” and the other as plain “AIX 7.1”. The difference at a glance seemed to be the porting image had more gnu / common open source tools e.g GNU/Tar though both images had a version of GCC installed.

The stock version came with GCC 4.2 built on AIX 6.1 whereas the porting image came with GCC 4.6.
Alongside the open source tools each instance also had proprietary tools installed including IBM’s compiler XLC, cc without any options invokes a man page which describes the different commands that represent a language at a level.

c99 – Invokes the compiler for C source files, with a default language level of STDC99 and specifies compiler option -qansialias (to allow type-based aliasing). Use this invocation for strict conformance to the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard..

The pkgsrc bootstrap process didn’t work too well by trying to allow it to workout things out for itself via cc so opted to use GCC specifically.

export CC=gcc

pkgsrc happily bootstrapped without privilege and I proceeded to install misc/tmux and shells/pdksh on AIX.

security/openssl comes with 4 different configuration settings for AIX, a pair of settings for the XLC & GCC compilers with a 32bit or 64bit target. It turned out that in pkgsrc it just defaulted to aix-cc (XLC with a 32bit target), pkg/49131 is now committed so the correct configuration is used, XLC successfully builds OpenSSL with a 32bit or 64bit ABI but GCC is only able to manage a 32bit target.

To switch compiler to xlc, declare it as the value to PKGSRC_COMPILER in your mk.conf.

Over the week I attempted to compile components of GCC 4.8 without much success, starting off with lang/gcc48-cc++ & falling back to lang/gcc48-libs.
The build process was very unstable, again as with the Tiger/PowerPC, the build would spin off & hang, pegging the CPU until killed. Attempting to restrict the processor time via ulimit didn’t have much effect.

Alongside trying to get GCC built on AIX, I kicked off building meta-pkgs/bulk-medium on sevan.mit.edu, the previously reported unfixed components prevented some of the packages from building again (ruby, MesaLib, cmake).

I began looking into fixing devel/cmake so that it would link against the correct version of curl libraries & use the matching header files, Modules/FindCURL.cmake in the cmake source references 4 variables which provide some control but I was unsuccessful in being able to pass these to the pkgsrc make process. While trying to resolve this issue I also discovered that on more recent version of Mac OS, the dependencies from pkgsrc ignored, opting for the use of the Apple supplied versions even though the pkgsrc version would be installed.

-- Found ZLIB: /usr/lib/libz.dylib (found version "1.2.5")
-- Found CURL: /usr/lib/libcurl.dylib (found version "7.30.0")
-- Found BZip2: /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib (found version "1.0.6")
-- Looking for BZ2_bzCompressInit in /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib
-- Looking for BZ2_bzCompressInit in /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib - found
-- Found LibArchive: /usr/lib/libarchive.dylib (found version "2.8.4")
-- Found EXPAT: /usr/lib/libexpat.dylib (found version "2.0.1")
-- Looking for wsyncup in /usr/lib/libcurses.dylib
-- Looking for wsyncup in /usr/lib/libcurses.dylib - found
-- Looking for cbreak in /usr/lib/libncurses.dylib
-- Looking for cbreak in /usr/lib/libncurses.dylib - found

mail/mailman had a missing README in PLIST which was handled differently between Tiger & newer releases. pkg/49143 was committed to fix that.

Didn’t uncover anything new in pkgsrc last week as my attention was more on coreboot, I had previously been building different parts of the tree on a couple of Mac’s which where disconnected from each other & copying packages to sevan.mit.edu manually for serving, as a first off this was a good idea but bad as an ongoing thing. What ends up happening is stale packages become left behind as they are unaccounted for, luckily there aren’t too many duplicates currently but it’s something which needs to be addressed in the set of packages currently available.

To test the status of AIX support in pkgsrc I joined the IBM Power Developer Platform which provides access to Power7/7+/8 systems running AIX 6.1 & 7.1 to build software on. This’ll be my first time on a Power system & AIX, looking forward to seeing what the OS is like.

With the addition of a G5 iMac to the effort kindly donated again by Thomas Brand, I started testing builds of lang/gcc48 on sevang5.mit.edu. Next step will be to get the two systems at MIT working together to build packages once I’ve been able to get GCC 4.8 to build successfully.

Following on from last week, I worked on components which caused large numbers of packages not to build.textproc/icu failed to build due to localtime_r() not being used if either _ANSI_SOURCE or _POSIX_C_SOURCE is defined & using an opcode that the shipped version of assembler didn’t understand. Ticket #9367 provided fixes for both issues spanning over 2 years, pkg/49077 covers this but has not been committed.databases/sqlite3 failed to link with ld: Undefined symbols: _OSAtomicCompareAndSwapPtrBarrier error, this is due to the lack of zone memory allocator, PR #49081 fixed this issue by defining -DSQLITE_WITHOUT_ZONEMALLOC for OS X releases prior to Leopard. This is PR was committed. A subsequent PR (pkg/49082) was raised to do the same for lang/tcl which also bundles its own copy of sqlite3 for its sqlite module, but has not been committed.

devel/pango was broken on OS X releases prior to Leopard as the package enabled the CoreText option by default but failed due to packing errors (CoreText is not available hence the .la file not existing when build has completed). pkg/49090 resolved the issue & was committed.

sh(22232) malloc: *** error for object 0x34e340: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed, break at szone_error to debug
sh(22232) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
sh(22232) malloc: *** Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x34d7ab; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
sh(22232) malloc: *** Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x34e340; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
checking sys/time.h usability... Makefile:16170: recipe for target 'configure-stage2-target-libgomp' failed
gmake[2]: *** [configure-stage2-target-libgomp] Error 137

The stability of sevan.mit.edu was improved by re-applying the 10.4.11 combo update.

Currently in the process of fixing devel/cmake, cmake now get through most of the build (it was previously failed at 3%) but fails at the linking stage due to path issues. It picks up the pkgsrc version of CURL as /usr/pkg/bin/curl but tries to link against libraries in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/pkg/lib which doesn’t exist.

This is summary of the things I worked on along with the help of others over the last week on pkgsrc.
With the donation of sevan.mit.edu along with a G4 Mac Mini at pksrcCon 2014 I setup bulk package builds as per chapter 7 of the pkgsrc guide to generate packages for OS X.
The bootstrap process is now able to differentiate between gcc & clang, as clang tries to be GCC compatible it tries to pass itself as GCC in tests, this would cause an issue where the bootstrap would use /usr/bin/clang for some parts of the build & /usr/bin/gcc for others, on top of that, the bootstrap process was hardcoded to use gcc on Darwin. The bootstrap process now defaults to using cc & correctly detects if that is clang or gcc.

security/sudo now builds on Darwin (confirmed on Tiger PowerPC & Mavericks), the no_exec module doesn’t build on Darwin & is switched off in the Apple supplied build of sudo, this wasn’t switched off in pkgsrc & caused the build to fail. There are more options set in the Apple build to improve posture which are not set in pkgsrc version, that needs looking into further & is on the TODO list.

The new release of help2man committed last week broke on Tiger due to NLS being switched off & the new version introducing additional translations of info pages. The patch in pkg/49059 fixes things so shared libraries are taken care of as with Leopard & the package is built with NLS support.

Currently working on trying to get graphics/MesaLib building with XQuartz, the version shipped with Tiger is based on XFree86 & MesaLib fails to link libraries, macports seem to have some fixes related to building on Tiger which I’m hoping may fix some of the issues.

Will also be looking at devel/cmake as it’s currently broken on Tiger which means things such as mysql server cannot be built at the moment.

Through the existence of a directory called devel in /tmp which was owned by a user other than the the one pbulk runs under, some critical components such as autoconf & tradcpp did not build on the Mac Mini, this caused many builds to fail, that aside, the Mini has managed to build 1064 out of a queue of 2083 packages over the last week.
sevan.mit.edu is currently down (due to possible hardware issues) & awaiting a reboot.

In pkgsrc there’s a facility which allows you to perform bulk builds of packages called pbulk.
Using this facility on a couple of donated systems I have started to generate packages for PowerPC OS X. Currently builds are performed on 32bit PowerPC Macs running OS X with pkgsrc-current. The binaries should in theory work on 64bit PowerPC systems and on Leopard but have not tested to confirm.
The packages are made available at sevan.mit.edu.
To utilise the packages on your system, fetch & uncompress the bootstrap archive which contains the pkgsrc tools.curl -s http://sevan.mit.edu/packages/bootstrap.tar.gz | sudo tar -zxpf - -C /

Update your PATH & MANPATH variablesPATH=/usr/pkg/sbin:/usr/pkg/bin:$PATH
On TigerMANPATH=/usr/pkg/man can be declared in /usr/share/misc/man.conf
On Leopard use path_helper(8) and create a file in /etc/manpaths.d which just contains /usr/pkg/man.
This can also be extended to PATH by creating a file in /etc/paths.d/ containing one path element per line. This requires testing however as the impact is system wide.

I recently moved my last Mac from Greenbytes Zevo to OpenZFS on OS X, the reason for both sticking with Zevo & switching to OpenZFS were one and the same, CPU usage.
Prior to the development of OpenZFS on OS X, the two choices for using ZFS on OS X where Zevo or MacZFS, Zevo originally started out as a commercial product but switched to a freebie after Greenbytes picked it up. Zevo had much better integration with OS X e.g disk would be automatically mounted when connected to system just like any other disk with a supported file system and it supported a v28 of the filesystem whereas MacZFS supported a much older version.

When the OpenZFS on OS X development began just over a year ago, I ran the test builds that where made available, though these supported new features through feature flags it was very early days, attempting to scrub a zpool on a i7 MacBook Air with a USB 3 disk would spike the CPU for the duration and again the integration was still missing, you manually had to import & export pools. I continued to try newer builds on my MacBook Air but stuck with Zevo on my 2007 MacBook Pro.

The two things which where annoying about Zevo was that it was a dead end, development had stopped, the last version available wasn’t compatible with Mavericks available and its conservative memory setting meant that disk performance wasn’t that great, during playing audio files it would break to buffer audio in iTunes for example (luckily not in Serato as mid set would’ve been embarrassing).

As the MacBook Pro was running low on disk space I tried to move around 40GB of files in several chunks in parallel to my external USB3 disk & noticed the CPU pegged and fans started up with Zevo too. OpenZFS on OS X is fairly robust now (though still rough around the edges) so I decided to switch over.

The OpenZFS on OS X disk image comes with uninstall scripts for Zevo & though the main script was unable to detect the installed copy of Zevo, I was able to run the subsequent scripts individually to remove Zevo from my system and reboot (eject the disk containing the filesystem beforehand (export the zpool)).

The integration with OS X is still missing though it seems that on boot zpools are imported, I’ve not worked out if that’s because the system caches the state from previous boot or this is the preliminary support for auto mounting???

If you want to eject a disk, you still have to export the pool manually from terminal, pressing the eject button in finder will remove the disk icon but the filesystem is still mounted. That aside, OpenZFS on OS X performed well, scrubbing the zpool on the 2007 MacBook Pro did not cause the CPU to spike at all, there is now a shorter delay in iTunes when starting to play a track but haven’t noticed any drops in audio yet, so things are looking positive.

Due to various factors, I’ve not had much of a chance to play with the PowerBook much this month, earlier this moth a follow up to PR/48740 happened, requesting feedback on new changes which had been committed that I’ve not had a chance to test yet.
One thing I did do tonight was to re-flash the SuperDrive with a RPC-1 firmware image which turns the DVD drive region-free.
The firmware images are hosted on MacBook.fr and cover Macs all the way back to G3’s.
Flashing was straightforward though I could only re-flash with the version currently on the drive. It was not possible to flash a newer stock or region-free image on the drive.
Aside from the firmware on the DVD drive, Mac OS also tries to enforce region locking, the Region X utility can reset the Mac OS related setting regarding content region.

Since I last posted about dealing with pkgsrc on my PowerBook earlier this week, a patch has been committed which solves the linker issue on lang/gcc45 along with another fix related to how stripping of binaries is handled on Darwin. Unfortunately PR/48740 mentioned gcc44 to 46 suffer from the same issue but the patch has not been applied to gc44 or 46, I’m waiting to hear back from the committer.
One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post is that there is another issue with build process for GCC. There appears to be a deadlock issue where sh sits there chewing up CPU & context switching, at this point, aborting the build with & restarting again allows the build to continue.
Attaching to sh with gdb does not give any further insight as to what’s going on 🙁